when is RGL doing a foray into healthcare and insurance? Lots of money to be made i think

FYI no player in TF2 has ever been detected/banned by the ESEA client anticheat

Source: trust me bro

it wasnt an anti-cheat to begin with

good to know, but even without an anticheat esea was overall better at dealing with cheaters. Maybe their human level anticheat team was more worthwhile.

edit: me brain damage have

i have no idea why you think this. i dont think esea ever banned any cheaters that i know of. literally back in s20 a bunch of people who were currently playing on client got vac banned before client banned

like i get it rgl sucks but lets not pretend esea was any better

ringer fees are a good thing. its a paid league and most leagues wouldnt give you the option to pay a greatly decreased fee for ringers. at least for invite paying $5 once or twice a season when you really need a ringer is nothing, in esea at one point you had to pay $85 for one ringer in invite. if anything i guess it should be less expensive to get a ringer in the less expensive divs

But it's one game a week, you're gonna be playing TF2 anyway so why not just sign up?

remember when esea had broken stv for like fifteen playoff matches in a row

Are we really setting the bar at 'better than a league where most of the admins didn't even know they hosted tf2'?

mfw RGL doesn't place restrictions on teams until they are fully paid up -> :)

not entirely related to ringers, but $till $mell$ fi$hy...

it being a lesser scam doesn't make it not a scam

ESEA
[+] Match statistics (per season, career, class-specific, map-specific, etc.)
[+] LAN for top Invite (until S19)
[+] Sane playoff sizes / bracket
[+] Invite at 8-9 teams every season
[+] Easily accessible STVs for every match
[+] Schedules out a week in advance
[-] ESEA Client (arguably the most garbage piece of technology created when it wasn't mining bitcoins)
[-] At most, there were two admins for the entirety of TF2
[-] For a time Invite cost you fucking $85 to play
[-] TF2 literally an afterthought; honestly remarkable ESEA TF2 lasted 29 seasons

RGL
[+] Excellent league structure (especially for lower-levels)
[+] On average better team numbers (granted the pandemic was a factor)
[+] Ringer flexibility (with a fee)
[+] Offseason events like New Map Cups
[+] Functional support ticket system (byproduct of having more than two admins)
[+] Multiple admins all across the league
[-] Awful decisions made by said admins (this could be like fourteen bullet points in and of itself)
[-] For a time fucking winning matches was not as important as the rounds / points system
[-] No match statistics whatsoever
[-] No LAN (granted the pandemic was a factor)
[-] Bad website that is down every three visits

Pick your flavor of poison. I mean we don't get to choose, but each league is good / bad for different reasons.

i just dont see how its a scam when you already have at least 6 people who paid a bigger fee already to play the season. why should ringers be free? if anything that only encourages getting a ringer when you could work around it and schedule things to get your full roster, or to get an upgrade ringer to try and win a match you wouldn't otherwise. getting a ringer should be a last resort after trying to schedule and trying to get a consistent rostered backup.

After this season I'm making the transition into UGC and not paying for this bullshit until they actually fix the issues that are more important that prolander one day cups.

Anyone looking for a soldier or scout in UGC?

You know what? Most of those positive bullet points are achievable very easily. There's many very talented and committed developers in this community, and furthermore, there's many tools available now that can significantly help with creating these.

I don't understand why it's a fucking burden for sigafoo to update his site. How is it that your site from 2017 is as bad as one from 2008? How the fuck is it possible for someone to create a company and not put effort into it once it works?

The site isn't bad because it's written poorly- it's bad because it's neglected. No one that I know of is updating the site except when sigafoo needs to add some tool for the admins to (ab)use. It's sad that a business someone created is not being updated because they'd much rather sit and cruise while not earning a profit off their side business, rather than trying to improve the system for the community and pioneering it to become profitable (it's certainly possible!).

Also, I agree with trippa. Ringer fees are kinda fair, and even if I hate paying to play for an rgl game, it's still quite good compared to what we had in the past. No reason to shit on them for that, in fact, it's quite petty to do that.

This is the orphan crushing machine all over again.

Like it's somehow both acceptable and accepted that all leagues in NA must be poisonous.

There was actually a choice and people chose RGL despite the warnings from many people. Dont pretend that RGL was just forced onto people and it was the only option we had post ESEA.

tino has a point, idk why anyone would want to play in a league that sigafoo created

NATF2L WHEN

very minor things here:
ESEA TF2 lasted a full 30 seasons, from S2 (Open only) to S31
Third-party logs are infinitely better than ESEA match logs (which are now mostly broken), though ESEA did feature aggregate/seasonal stats which was fun

I would also add that while RGLs method of dealing with team entities/pages is far from well-implemented (teams only last for one season, even though this section exists—each season froyo played technically creates a new team with a new ID), they don't have ESEA's issues with rosters being bought and sold to bypass divisional qualifications. RGL also preserve the name of past teams at the time of the season, instead of leading people to believe that Ma3la played 11 seasons for froyo black.

there was a choice between:

-an existing league that offered to add sixes
-a nebulous alternative with few details

maybe that's my memory being unfair, but i wouldn't be surprised if that's what it seemed like to a lot of people, especially in lower divs who weren't paying close attention.

There was always (imo) an elitism against using UGC for NA if you wanted to showoff your stuff. Back in the good old days when teams were a plenty literally everywhere the strat was to play ugc 6s for either fun & to find out if you wanted to actually get into this thing, practice before getting into esea etc. The top 3-4 plat teams were usually good enough to be in high open-IM sometimes in terms of skill level so unless they wanna earn 15 keys for first place in ugc (lol) they get competitive and move onto esea.

ESEA had you pay so u already had to be serious about playing this game on a set schedule practicing etc. Big deal for the young gamers out there who kinda don't have $10 to their name sometimes. Their own servers which was kinda cool I guess, everyone being tagged up, idk it was neat. Living up to the old legends of tf2 that were once the best but either quit for (usually) life reasons. New players and old wanted to live up to that, old players wanted to one day beat team b4nny. Get ur legacy as getting first place in season X of ESEA to finally beat the b4nny right there on the esea website, a website that we all know isn't going down so that's history right there. This was all back in 2011-2017ish though and it's kinda sad to see where 6s is now. Why not use UGC right? Not like it was ever a bad website for simple stuff like setting matches on record.

This game has kinda turned into the competitive scene of insurgency 1 at least when it was "popular". Like 6-8 teams that'd play each other 24/7. No problem with that I still consider tf2 a top 3 game in terms of fps games. While tf2 isn't that bad population wise I honestly don't see a reason for a league to charge money for anything anymore. Just make a website with brackets and ask for donations to keep the ppl working behind it motivated + have a prize pool. $5 though isn't bad for 1 ringer back in esea u had to pay for premium + the fees which was idk man $15 already? somethin like that?

I believe the kinda stigma towards ugc has stayed is what im gettin at. Just make new divs in ugc above plat for the better players and maybe you boys got yourself a winner. Long history there I suppose.

Honestly only reason I'd come back to tf2 is because it is simply one of the best fps games I've ever played. The half life engine did this game wonders you know? But would I pay for a league when the glory of tf2 has gone away? idk man. Seems like u guys pay and still all these problems exist so there u go

UGC is completely unproven as a high level 6s league (their biggest 6s match ever would be the equivalent of an Advanced pugscrim today), and has its own history of poor decisions and bad admins. It has existed for over a decade and was never once even close to competing with either ESEA or RGL 6s (and also lost its dominance in HL to RGL very quickly). Not to say it couldn't, but people seem to talk about it as if its some unjustly maligned and ignored league which would be perfect if we the players did all of the work of by migrating to it from RGL on our own.

Incidentally, I heard the same stuff when CEVO failed, that it was the players fault for not signing up, as if it's not the league's job to promote itself and incentivize signups—things CEVO ended up doing terribly or not at all.

Such a long time ago when the community tried cevo haha. Thing is players actually did sign up for it because I think we were hopeful it could replace ESEA. The website had a nice simple layout and CEVO ofc has the natural branding behind it same as esea so we did try it. I think ur right the company itself just couldn't sell it over esea, and plus didn't cevo merge with esea anyway or am I wrong there?

I think we just liked ESEA too much and now it's too late? I think it's fine if sigafoo or whoever manages the rgl site to stay with prolander and highlander if that's their thing, so we got that sorted great.

Now who's gonna make the next website and convince people to go there instead? lol

This game has some of the most talented and dedicated individuals time and time again. I remember back when technosex was testing his sizzling stats page and so he invited me and some other friends to test it out sometimes. He made the website good because he put his heart into it I mean I was addicted to looking at my useless stats simply for the reason it looked better than whatever that other stat page was, looked more clean. But this way back when tf2 esea had a main division, that's how big tf2 was back then so the motivation was there for ppl like him. Game kinda died off though which is a shame. If this was 2014-2016 u guys would make a new site in like a week and boom done but we ain't there anymore :(

maybe invite more admins to help sigafoo out? Maybe bring along a coder guy to make the layout better on his site? I do agree that the layout isn't very good but it isn't terribly unusable either. Not many options here u know

i distinctly remember that the reason people chose rgl was because they announced their league first. as in, rgl announced that they had everything set up and gave a date for s1 to start about a week before any of the other leagues did (i assume the other leagues were working things out and trying to make sure the logistics were set up for them to function). By the time the other leagues announced, rgl had already gotten a lot of support. ironically, rgl had to delay the season by multiple weeks anyways and started a month after their initial announcement bc of problems, but nobody cared about that and nobody switched.

rgl definitely has problems but considering how petty all the NATF2L people act in these threads i doubt they would be perfect admins and run a perfect league like they claim

ya honestly a lot of the problems listed here seem very fixable some1 just has to get sigafoo or whoever over there to care. Look I ain't played comp tf2 in awhile so I'm kind of an outsider here but rgl doesn't provide servers, they give priority to highlander players for the whole ringer situation, no one plays this game for the prize pool it's played because it's fun and no other games rly exist like tf2 anymore. So why care about a prize pool right? I don't think that was ever the reason any one of us started playing comp 6s/highlander. Why pay right?

At least esea provided servers and had Tri as the admin and I don't care if he was only 1 of 2 admins or whatever that guy cared. Wasn't solidsnake an admin at one point too or am I thinking of...boomer? Hell long time ago anyway but these dudes gave a damn.

It sounds like rgl has volunteers already so maybe it's up to them to go to sigafoo about this?

Then the other side of the coin is you all had chances to find another website or provider for this kinda thing so if we just stayed with that this thread wouldn't exist. But not enough wanted to change to something else. It's like 20 scouts and soldiers queuing up for a pug but it never starts all damn night bc no one wanted to take the real initiative of going medic. So now ur left with either an ok medic but certainly not an invite level one. The picking process was rushed and the pug ended up being mediocre.

I'm kinda thinking about maybe joining a team maybe not but if I gotta pay $5 for a dead game that became even more dead for a useless prizepool and no real support then eh maybe I'll just mge again or someshit. Seriously I'd rather donate the dev team of rgl some money rather than be forced to follow all of the rules they put into place.

I mean come on alfa is an og player don't do this to him sigafoo

SIGAFOO..

nerdpost time

imo? the only competent people working for rgl are on the anticheat team, and theyre HILARIOUSLY overworked, to the point where theyre barely better than esea in that regard. sigafoo doesn't care, i harassed him for six months to enable cloudflare, and even offered to do it myself, because i have exp with sysadmining. he said "eh" and it never happened. i never saw a trello or pinboard or any kind of organizational tool (outside of random gdocs scattered among 6 people's accounts) used in the entire organization, outside of the gfx team, which had an unused trello, and the ac team, which i wrote the form for and set up a google sheets page for. non ac reports would get ignored for weeks, or be unilaterally decided upon by a random admin and then exa/sig would rubber stamp it and send it out. i would get repeatedly yelled at for "mIsRePrEsEnTiNg ThE bRaND" for posts on my twitter account. i eventually got booted off after pug banning one too many people who called me a tranny in voice chat because apparently i needed to go through someone to do that? despite other admins/mods not being able to? what?

i'm with creators tf now, and while it may be a bit of a clusterfuck sometimes, the difference is insane. there's multiple git repositories. people have clear and well defined roles within the project. the moderation team is phenomenal and does research on every case they get sent. there's constant development on all fronts- website, gameserver, you name it. theres even a whole ass feedback channel that is regularly scraped from for new features or improvements to old ones. there's multiple trellos (internal and external), we have sentryio set up to log website and server errors. theres passion and care put into all aspects of the project, and there's great communication between all members.

theres none a that in rgl. sigafoo does not care. he is more than content having a barely functional c# disaster of a website, and the organization and the people in it seem to be content with having little to no communication and with next to nothing being done in terms of improving in general.

idk man. i have lost faith in the na esports scene. while i applaud rgl's stance on combatting bigotry, i think they should focus on more important things.

guess he got way over his head in trying to force 6s into his project when this was a player who really only played highlander. I'm not saying he is or was a bad player infact he was great at engineer but I feel like u should've been in invite or high IM or somethin to try to manage 6s for a separate website. If anything he'd naturally interact with more 6s mains + he'd care about the state of it more because he'd play it too ya know?

I don't think as an admin and site owner I'd wanna get into a situation where on my own 6s team on my own website I need to forfeit the teams prize pool because I had player issues. Oops I wrote it in the rules that way silly me! ofc not he'd fix all of this shit if he was a 6s player

Failry sure I am one of the only people actually still "around" (haven't played more than 5 pugs in over a year) but I just stir shit at this point because its amusing. Do I think other leagues would be perfect? Fuck no, there will always be issues, but I do believe that they would be better than RGL. But tbh RGL is literally all you guys will get at this point because pretty much all of the backend people who wanted to even try to work on a project like this have said fuck it and left and don't care anymore.